I love the work that Erika and her team are doing. But with tongue in
cheek, as the CEO of a company that is often chided for being way too
nice, perhaps, for our own or anyone’s good, I feel the need, along with
my fellow leaders, to respond. Politely. Here’s the statement from
Erika’s article about useful rules of the road on honesty that compelled
me to write this rebuttal:

“One sentence in particular caught my eye: ‘Our
survey uncovered a disturbing statistic: 37 percent of respondents felt
their organizations suffered from the malady of “terminal niceness,”
valuing politeness over the pursuit of the best ideas and
perspectives.’”

“I’ve long seen the negative impact of ‘terminal niceness’ (great
phrase) in organizations. In such organizations, people think the way
to support and respect each other is to be polite at any cost: not to
disagree, give people tough news, hold them accountable, or let them
know when they’re not succeeding.”

Well, to some degree, I’ll admit that we do resemble that remark.
Within our walls you will find a preponderance of niceness. In our 7
Non-Negotiables, Respect is paramount. So is Loyalty, Commitment, and
Trust. We are polite at any cost, true enough. But to equate that
“niceness” with the inability to give bad news, to hold each other
accountable, or to give appropriate feedback—this is where we must
disagree.
Erika notes that although “too much niceness” may feel superficially
good, it creates all kinds of problems. Here are the eight most
significant problems she notes, followed by my own response and rebuttal
to each:1) Employees don’t get the feedback they need to grow and improve.
None of us see ourselves entirely clearly. We all need to get an
unbiased third-party perspective about our strengths and weaknesses. In
an overly nice culture, it’s as though employees are flying blind, with
no way to find out how they need to improve. It’s a huge opportunity
cost; most employees don’t achieve their potential because they don’t
hear about what they’re doing well and badly.

I disagree entirely. In fact, I would turn this statement completely
around. What employee is willing to accept feedback in an environment of
criticism? Within a culture of trust and respect a great leader can
mentor and guide an employee in the discovery of the “blind spots” that
are holding each of us back. Team members learn and grow together to
achieve seemingly impossible goals. In fact, many of our greatest
members are the individuals who came to us feeling damaged by the style
of feedback they’d received in the past.

2) Bad ideas get implemented because no one pushes back.
In “nice” cultures, everyone thinks they need to be supportive by not
disagreeing with each other. So when someone has an idea that won’t
work, or that can’t be implemented – no one says anything, and
tremendous time and effort can be wasted pursuing it.

On the contrary, consider the possibility that in a truly nice
culture, every idea is heard and counted. Often the greatest ideas come
from the youngest or newest members of the team, who feel that it’s safe
in a respectful environment to speak up, and to question the validity
of doing things the way they’ve always been done. Our niceness supports
these possibilities and encourages opening up in a way that
disrespectfully disagreeing could never achieve.

3) Lack of healthy debate makes it difficult to build new processes and products.
When you’re trying to change things, you have to be willing to openly
discuss and debate the pros and cons of various possibilities. If people
are more concerned with being polite and not hurting each other’s
feelings than they are about figuring out how to do things differently –
innovation is impossible.
On this point, we agree. Healthy debate is the lifeblood of a growing
and thriving organization. But I believe we can achieve that innovation
and can actually do so more effectively without hurting each other’s
feelings along the way.

4) The “real” conversations happen offline, rather than face-to-face.
If people can’t say what they really feel in public, they’ll still say
it – but to third parties. In other words, if person A has an issue with
person B, they’ll tell persons C, D and E about it. It creates a
culture of gossip, secrecy, and clique-ishness…making it nearly
impossible to have a trusting and truly supportive environment.
On the contrary, in an environment of courtesy and trust, people feel
able to say whatever they need to say, as long as it is expressed
within the context of trust and respect. In an environment of respect,
there’s no need (and no benefit) to hold anything back.

5) Senior Execs are seen as weak – and not trusted.
When bad things happen in the organization, and senior execs respond by
being politically correct and evasive…no one is fooled. It just makes
the execs look bad – and it makes employees get self-protective. “If our
leaders can’t stand up and be honest about the big things that are
going on,” they reason, “what else aren’t they telling us?”

I, for one, will own up to being the “weak” executive who has spoken
openly with my team about every occurrence—both good and bad—we’ve had.
When we were in crisis at the 11th hour of our company
buyback in 2011, I needed to tell them that the funding we’d secured had
fallen $500,000 short of our goal. I had done all I could do. They
could have called me “weak” and derided my efforts. Instead, they pulled
out checkbooks, donated retirement funds, voluntarily accepted pay
cuts—and together, we got the deal done. Now there are 71 employee
owners of Fishbowl. As leaders, we will never be anything but honest, no
matter how harsh the news. We are far from perfect, but to this day, no
one in our organization has ever considered that fallability “weak.” In
fact, we celebrate together the opportunities to “fail up.”

Being a kind and benevolent leader was a winning strategy for "Honest Abe" Lincoln (Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

6) People aren’t required to own their mistakes, and so don’t develop responsibility.
In a culture where people are praised, but aren’t held accountable for
failures, nobody has to say, I’m sorry, and here’s how I’ll fix it. This
leads to an environment of passivity and avoiding of responsibility:
i.e., “The project wasn’t successful” vs. “We didn’t succeed.”

In what way does niceness serve to inhibit the accountability we
hold? In fact, our organization is nice enough that team members pull
together and accept accountability together for both their successes and
failures as a unified team. What could possibly serve an organization
better than that?

7) Issues build up, poisoning relationships.
When people don’t have a chance to get their issues with each other out
in the open and resolve them in an honest and mutually respectful way,
those issues don’t go away – they fester. Over time, the weight of
unresolved issues can turn good working relationships into superficial,
polite interactions without joy or trust.

I do agree with this point. Unresolved issues can only fester and
develop a wedge in the relationship that can only grow worse over time.
But in an environment of courtesy, people actually do have the
chance to get their issues out in the open where they can be healed and
resolved. Niceness doesn’t get in the way of this process—in my opinion,
it serves to support the environment of honesty and mutual respect.

8) Business-destroying problems don’t get resolved.
This is the biggie. If the highest value in a culture is to be “nice,”
no one stands up and says, “Such-and-such is a huge issue – and if we
don’t address it, we’re in big trouble.” That’s way too brash and
confrontational. But if you don’t acknowledge those business-killing
problems, you can’t resolve them.

Again, how does “being nice” inhibit the discussion of issues? I
maintain that the priority of niceness (we call it “respect”) makes
every discussion a greater opportunity to be as open and honest as
needed in getting big issues—even the most jugular ones—resolved.

Erika concludes: “Don’t misunderstand me: the alternative to ‘nice’
isn’t ‘mean,’ or ‘heartless.’ The best alternative (and antidote) for
too much niceness is honesty offered with a positive intent. If companies can cultivate that kind of culture – they can avoid all these problems, and many others as well.”

While I disagree with the majority of her eight statements, I can
agree fully with Erika’s conclusion that the epitome of productive
communication is honesty offered with a positive intent. In our
company’s experience, however, we can achieve this goal far more
readily in an environment where we, and everyone who engages with us,
plays nice. No, there’s no danger in being too nice. In fact, I would
maintain even more strongly than ever that when it comes to being nice
and polite, we could all strive to improve our efforts a little bit
more.